CHAPTER TWO
The Zucchini Situation
“A thank-you from Judy,” said our waitress at a café as she laid an entire freshly baked, still-steaming loaf of zucchini bread on the table. It was a kind gesture from Judy, who was the owner of the café, basically thanking one of us—Tim—for being a regular patron.
We authors ought to have been ecstatic because zucchini bread, when done right, is the best thing ever, with its crunchy exterior giving way to a brown, moist, oily, vegetably interior—although we feel we may be underselling just how scrumptious it is. Anyhow, our point is that zucchini bread is near the top in each of our lists of foods we’d pick to eat if we could only eat one thing for the rest of our lives. Vegetables, flour, utter deliciousness—all the food groups!
As we wrote above, we ought to have been ecstatic. But we weren’t. Judy had unintentionally (or perhaps even intentionally!) caused a teapot of trouble in her café. She had created—wait for it—the zucchini situation!
Why are we being so melodramatic about getting our favorite thing, and for free? Because there were two of us at the table. And we both go zany for zucchini bread. And did we mention she only gave us a single loaf? There we authors were, salivating at the moist, sugary goodness and wondering, “How much of it do I get?”
While two scientists struggling to share a dessert bread miraculously made out of a gourd may seem peculiar, and a little pathetic, it serves to illustrate the general situation social animals struggled with for millions of years: social disagreement. The zucchini situation is just a typical case of two social animals vying for their fair share of a limited resource where a compromise is needed.
“How to come to a compromise?” is the million-dollar question for social animals. It’s the question of this book. And it’s the question whose answer leads inevitably to the emotional expressions social animals possess. But in order to build a haggle-babble signaling system for negotiating our way out of all the zucchini disagreements thrust upon social animals, we need to understand what disagreements even are.
As we mentioned in the previous chapter, although negotiation sounds like a simple back-and-forth sequence of offers, there’s actually quite a bit more to it. By the end of the next chapter, we’ll have a clearer (but incomplete) understanding of what’s going on under the hood when, along with his offer for compromise, Tim petulantly adds, “And I’m done arguing about this!” As we started to talk about in the first chapter, these sorts of “and that’s my final offer” add-ons go well beyond a simple offer. But to get there, we’ll also unravel some of the most important machinery within negotiations to allow us to begin making headway into the emotional expressions needed for negotiation.
And although we already know that coming to compromise involves a “back-and-forth volley of offers,” we’re not going to assume that’s the case (we’ll get to that in chapter four). Rather, our task now is to begin from first principles, asking what sort of system makes sense for languageless social animals. Back to the zucchini situation.
Talking It Out Is Out
Despite our immaturity when it comes to sharing zucchini bread, being the modern humans we are, we at least had the benefit of language, allowing us to carry out our negotiation using words. But that’s not an option for other social animals who have no language ability. It’s not how social animals or we humans evolved to negotiate.
All those words we use are often just flourish riding atop the compromise-finding emotionally expressive signaling mechanisms really at play: our facial expressions, subtle skin color changes, countenance, and voice intonation are often doing much more of the talking. It’s often what’s unsaid that determines the matter—like the way, during the zucchini situation, Mark’s nostrils twitched as if he were about to use the butter knife for something a bit eyeball-ier than butter.
As the evolutionary route to compromise shows, then, talking it out is . . . out.
The million-dollar question for social animals is actually, “How do we negotiate a compromise without language?” That’s a much more difficult challenge, and to answer it, we need to understand what a compromise even is. To do that, we need to get clear on what a disagreement even is first.
Think Different
Why are there disagreements in the first place?
At its simplest, the zucchini disagreement—like all disagreements—occurred because Tim and Mark had different wants. Because each had the sophistication of the seagulls in Pixar’s Finding Nemo who only said “Mine! Mine! Mine!” each wanted the entire loaf.
Even among the less greedy-natured social animals not single-mindedly demanding the whole kit and caboodle, it’s common to find that both parties can’t get what they want. If I want 51 percent of something and you also want 51 percent of something, then it’s no more mathematically possible for our wants to be fully satisfied than if we each wanted it all.
Animals want what other animals want, and it’s these inconsistent wants that are the ultimate underlying reason for why there are disagreements.
But that’s not the disagreement itself. Although each of us most definitely wanted all the bread—we each seriously did!—we both understood we’d have to compromise. What really made it a disagreement was that Tim and Mark had different beliefs on how the zucchini bread ought to be apportioned.
In this case, it turned out that we each believed we should get twice as much as the other person. Each therefore believed, “I should get two-thirds of the zucchini loaf.” (“Mostly mine! Mostly mine! Mostly mine!” is quite an advance from seagulls.) Each of us had a belief, but those beliefs were different. Mark believed Tim should get one-third of the loaf (which Mark justified on the basis that Mark was the guest), but Tim believed that (as a regular patron) Tim should instead get two-thirds (see Figure 1). If we had both believed Tim should get two-thirds (or any fraction), then there’d be no disagreement.
Figure 1. The “zucchini situation” is a disagreement between the authors, Tim and Mark, about how much of the zucchini loaf each should get. As simple as such a disagreement might seem, it has all the structure of a typical disagreement that languageless social animals have long had to deal with. And the million-dollar question is: What communication system can they use to negotiate a compromise?
Disagreements are commonplace all over the animal world about all sorts of things, things well beyond zucchini bread or even delectable morning loaves more generally. But underlying all disagreements are (1) beliefs—at least implicitly held, and (2) the issue of two animals having different beliefs. Rather than our zucchini-specific diagram in Figure 1, we’ve placed the more general zucchini-less version in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Disagreements aren’t always about zucchini bread. So here’s the more general variant of Figure 1, minus the scrumptiousness. That horizontal line here, and in all the diagrams in this book, is the compromise axis. It’s the range of all the possible compromises Mark and Tim (or any two animals having a disagreement) could come to. We’ll always portray Mark’s favored direction on the left and Tim’s on the right. Each has a belief about what the compromise should be, and they’re different beliefs. That’s what makes it a disagreement. The truth is usually somewhere in the middle.
Two differing beliefs: that’s a start to making sense of what a disagreement is, but we’re going to need some more ingredients.
Cards on the Table
There we were at opposite sides of the table on which sat the best loaf of zucchini bread ever. Each of us believed we were entitled to two-thirds of it. And we each knew the other’s belief. We were having a disagreement. How we settled it became the next question.
First, let’s look at how we would settle it if we had no way to signal a compromise. How do non-social animals settle their disagreements?
The old-fashioned way. Via a fight!
Sometimes it might be a literal fight, like that time when Mark lunged for the last cheese blintz, but Tim flipped over the table, snatched the blintz out of the air, and wolfed it down before Mark could get to his feet. Physical prowess decided the matter. Much of our intuition about emotional expressions and fights emanates from the idea of physical fights, and especially of the tooth-and-claw variety like Nigel’s crushing blow to Butch’s temple, where we imagined that Nigel’s heart rate and blood pressure had gone up.
But the notion of a “fight” goes far beyond the dueling-with-swords variety. The key to the general notion of a fight that matters for compromise is that it’s a way of resolving the disagreement. Broadswords are good at settling matters, but there are lots and lots of other ways in which a disagreement can be resolved.
For example, it could be that, in our community, we’re expected to arm wrestle for it. This would still require physical prowess—a wee bit of violence—but in a contained fashion. The social community would witness the event, ensuring that the arm-wrestling outcome decided the disagreement.
If, say, we were arguing about how high Olaf the dog can jump, a fight might consist of using a treat—but not zucchini bread!—to coax Olaf to jump as high as possible.
In many varieties of fight, there’s a decision maker involved: a judge. Perhaps the tribe leader—or Judy, the ever-absent café owner, who gave us the divisive dessert!—makes the decision based on whose bow tie is snazzier. For children, a fight can sometimes involve going to a parent to decide—mom or dad is the judge if a compromise can’t be found. One obvious variety of fight is the modern-day lawsuit, something that comes with a real, live Juris Doctorate–wielding judge if the parties can’t come to a compromise outside the courtroom.
And sometimes a fight can be settled by simply looking it up in an encyclopedia. As kids we could argue all day about some topic, and since there was no encyclopedia anywhere nearby, it could take weeks to finally find out who was correct. Now, with the internet at our split-second fingertips, those hours of endless arguments aren’t even worth it—the judge and jury to the fight is always at our beck and call. Even math itself can settle a fight. Let’s say we’re disagreeing about the square root of eighty-three million. A fight might involve us simply calculating it on a calculator; the laws of math itself would be the judge and jury.
For a stereotypical negotiation over some asset, like a house, a fight occurs when one or both parties walk away from the discussion. The market becomes the judge as to how much the house is truly worth. For example, perhaps the very next day the house sells for ten grand higher than the buyer had last offered, indicating that the buyer had been very wrong!
Fights come in endless varieties, but they’re similar in that they’re settled by force rather than compromise—by force of arms, logic, data, judges, and so on. Fights lead to judgments (the outcome of the “contest”) that determine how the disagreement will be settled.
Fights are crucial for making sense of disagreements in part because that’s always the implicitly understood alternative to compromise.
Beliefs Are Beliefs About Fights
Beliefs in disagreements are always about what would happen if the parties were to fight about it. “You and I are sophisticated social animals. Let’s not fight about it like the riffraff, non-social animals always do. But—just saying—if we were to fight about it, here’s how much zucchini bread I’d get. And that’s why I should get that much. It’d be a shame if we had to go to that level.” Social animals may be looking to avoid the costly fight, but fights are still the ultimate fallback, and at the core of it all.
In a sense, then, social animals are sports writers. You know, the writers that drone on day after day about the “what ifs” of sports and get into picayune arguments with one another about who will win, say, the upcoming boxing match. Just like us, their beliefs concern what will happen at the fight. We’re the same—our beliefs are beliefs about fights, but our fights need not be of the physical, sportsy variety, but about anything where there’s some “judge” to determine who is right.
Less obviously, fights are also crucial in understanding the exact nature of beliefs within disagreements. Recall that disagreements concern the fact that the two parties have differing beliefs, but we were a little loose on what those beliefs look like. We had left it roughly as something like, “I believe I should get two-thirds of the zucchini bread.” But how exactly would we decide how much one party should get?
The exact nature of the form of the beliefs depends on the kind of fight that would occur if a consensual compromise wasn’t possible. Saying that Mark’s belief was that “Tim should get one-third of the loaf” moves us in the right direction; however, more specifically, Mark’s belief will refer to the fight itself. For example, if the fight was to ask Judy about how she intended the loaf to be divided between us, then Mark’s belief would actually be: “Were we to query Judy about her intent, she would say that Tim is supposed to get one-third.”
More generally, beliefs in disagreements take the form of, “I believe I would get X if we were to fight.” In modern courtroom parlance this would be, “I would get X if I were to take you to court.”
Boring Versus Dramatic
In the first chapter we wondered if emotional expressions could really get their full explanation from negotiations. The very word “negotiation” is boring and businesslike, whereas emotional expressions are far from boring; instead, they’re more like the paradigm example of not boring. All worthwhile movies, recall, are worthwhile because of their emotional expressions, without which there would be no drama . . . and no viewers.
How, then, can negotiation, if it’s lacking one of the principal ingredients in emotional expressions—the drama—even be on the right track toward explaining the origins of emotional expressions?
One way to help feel that negotiations are, in fact, deeply dramatic is to remind yourself how you feel during most negotiations. Emotions run notoriously high. Sure, you might be sitting around a conference table in some serious negotiation with corporate lawyers wielding calculators and wearing dapper shoes, but that doesn’t make it sterile. Everyone in the room is on edge. They can feel the drama.
Try to recall your house purchase. It almost certainly had a considerable amount of drama, especially at the very end. That’s why folks become inordinately close to their realtors—they’ve gone through an emotional roller coaster together.
So, we shouldn’t balk at the idea that emotional expressions might be about negotiations on the basis that negotiations are too boring for that. That’s simply not the case.
Eight-Hundred-Pound Gorilla
But why, more exactly, are negotiations so dramatic? A couple sections earlier, we got a good hint as to the answer. In that section we realized that beliefs in disagreements are really of the form, “I would get X if we were to fight.” Beliefs (in disagreements), we determined, are actually beliefs about fights.
So, where you might mistakenly imagine that negotiation is sterile because you’re thinking about some dollar values thrown back and forth across the table, the negotiation gets its dramatic side because it might fail. And if the negotiation fails, a fight is on, and there’s little in the world that’s more dramatic than a fight!
Negotiations aren’t boring and sterile, and that’s because there’s always an eight-hundred-pound gorilla looming nearby in the room—the “fight gorilla.” Make your offer as undramatically as you wish, but the gorilla is always there to remind both parties via occasional grunts that whatever sterile pretense you’re putting on is indeed just a pretense. If either party says the word, the gorilla’s fists crash down on the negotiation, and both parties get sent to the proverbial coliseum, where a fight will occur.
For example, when buying a house, a fight would be that the two parties give up on the negotiation and instead walk away, letting the market decide who’s right. Maybe the buyer later ends up paying even more for a worse house, or the seller finds another buyer willing to pay much more. If either of those eventualities were to occur, the buyer would be the loser of that fight. And it’s the thought of that possibility that makes the negotiation dramatic.
Woulds and Shoulds
So, we shouldn’t discount the idea that emotional expressions might be all about negotiations on the basis of an argument that negotiations aren’t sufficiently dramatic. They’re gorilla-frenzy-level dramatic! And that’s because they’re all about fights.
But there’s another way to feel the drama of negotiations, one coming at it from a distinct angle. So far, we’ve arrived at the following phrase: “I would get X if we were to fight.”
But I could instead just say, “I should get X.”
For example, if your daughter yells at your son, “I should get half of the last cupcake!” she’s implicitly saying that she would get it if she were to complain to mom.
“Should” has snuck into this! We’re now in the realm of “oughts,” or in the moral realm. I ought to get two-thirds of the zucchini loaf, in that that’s how much I would get if we were to fight about it.
More than merely dramatic, then, negotiations are tinged with morality and fairness. It’s in disagreements that have been inappropriately adjudicated where one party feels they have been “wronged.” Negotiations aren’t just dramatic because of itchy-trigger-finger fight gorillas, but because they exist in the realm of ethics; negotiations are about what’s right.
Notice that, like negotiations, emotional expressions also fall within the theater of ethics. The stereotypical situation where I might express anger is one in which I’ve been wronged. And if I signal appreciation, I’m saying something more like the opposite—you did the opposite of wronging me; you aided me. Here’s some moral praise from me to you!
Negotiations and emotional expressions don’t feel quite so far apart as when we first mentioned them back in the introductory chapter, do they? Even in that chapter we saw signs of emotional expressiveness in negotiations themselves (“and this is my final offer!”). And over the last several sections we have seen that negotiations are akin to emotional expressions in two other respects: they have eight-hundred-pound-gorilla levels of drama, and they are tinged with moral associations.
None of that means that emotional expressions are the steering wheels of negotiation (i.e., the tools we use to make a “move” in a negotiation). We’re far too early in the book to fully show that yet. But it does help us overcome any prior prejudices we might have had toward negotiations, opening our minds to the notion that, maybe, just maybe, emotional expressions just are the steering wheels of negotiation.
Fighting for Truth
In addition to morality finding its way into disagreements, another surprising consequence of this is that fights, despite being messy and possibly even bloody, are the mechanism for uncovering something quite abstract and beautiful: truth.
Beliefs are about what the truth is. In the realm of disagreement, then, truth is just the judgment emanating from a fight.
For social disagreements, we now see how beliefs are connected to fights and the truth. If I say, “I should get two-thirds of the loaf,” it’s because I think it’s true that, “were we to track down Judy, she’d say she intended two-thirds for me.”
That’s the sense in which I feel like I’ve been “wronged” if the fight isn’t carried out correctly. Suppose Judy decides to grant zucchini-apportioning power to her six-year-old boy, a child who has no idea of our respective breakfast-loaf merits! Via a travesty like that, the purported truth emanating from the six-year-old-judge-and-jury fight will be wrong—like, morally wrong. The fight will have been carried out unfairly.
In negotiations, (1) fights, (2) the tinge of morality, and (3) truth are all bound tightly together. As we’ll see as we proceed, the same is true for emotional expressions.
Can’t Handle the Truth
It sounds like social animals have everything under control. They can settle any disagreement about what the truth is by simply engaging in that truth-finding mechanism that’s always available: fight, fight, fight!
As much as we authors value truth—almost as much as zucchini bread—we’d really like to avoid discovering the truth. Why? Because the truth can hurt! As we’ve learned, getting to the truth requires a fight, and fights can be costly, even if you win.
This is obviously true for physical fights. It’s better to enjoy one-third of a loaf than two-thirds of a loaf . . . and a black eye, pulled hair, and a wedgie. But it’s also true for many non-physical fights. Fights take time and consume energy. Lawsuits, for example, are notoriously costly in time, stress, legal fees, and the possibility of judge-imposed fines.
It’s often better to endure an unhappy compromise than find that the truth is on your side via the costs of a big fight or, worse, that the truth is not on your side after suffering the costs of a big fight.
Furthermore, fights are often avoided not just because we don’t want to get hurt, but because we don’t want to hurt others. Even if I’m right, I might want to avoid rubbing your nose in it. Remember, negotiations generally can be acrimonious or friendly.
Even when fights aren’t costly per se, there’s often a benefit to coming to a compromise—I might want all of it, but I’d much prefer to have something rather than risk the chance of not getting anything (shudder the thought!). More generally, a life filled with negotiated compromises, rather than fights, smooths things over. The extreme, erratic ups and downs of our earlier shark buddies, Nigel and Butch, generally make life much harder.
Fights are bad. That’s why we found a compromise to the zucchini situation without discovering the truth by fighting about it. And that’s why social animals would really, really like to have a way of coming to a compromise instead, even though it means sacrificing discovery of the truth.
Networking the Truth
And that’s how the truth died! Social animals figured out a way to avoid dealing with, day after day, the painful process of discovering the truth. Nigel and Butch, on the other hand, have no option but to fight and discover the truth every single time. Settling out of court was never an option for the dead-eyed, non-social animals.
There’s an irony in this. Social animals are among the smartest animals found on Earth; yet the very fact that they’re social at all means they’ve evolved ways of avoiding the truth.
Social animals haven’t fully killed off the truth. The truth is always looming large—that’s why the eight-hundred-pound fight gorilla is wearing its “I’m your truth, right here!” T-shirt as a constant reminder. The truth is always what two disagreeing parties will have to resort to if they can’t come to an agreement. But only the social animals had the gall to evolve mechanisms for avoiding what some might imagine is what any supposedly bright creature should aim toward! Truth.
Given that social animals like us are seemingly content with non-truth, how is it that we manage to, as a social group, come to know more and more about the world? That’s something that emerges at the level of the group, as some members acquire higher reputations from a history of being right (morally, too!), and a social narrative develops. The accrual of reputation itself comes from emotionally expressive social interactions, something we’ll discuss later in the book.
Everyone often may be willing to overlook the truth if it saves some skin, but society as a whole has the needed mechanisms to gradually stumble toward the truth.
A Chapter for Each Dimension
As we have seen in this chapter, a disagreement isn’t quite as simple as one might have initially thought. In addition to our differing beliefs—without which we’d not be having a disagreement at all—there’s the ever-present threat of a fight. The entire point of negotiating is to avoid letting things “go there.” And once you’ve decided to avoid fights, you’ve decided that truth just ain’t your main thing.
While we’ve made some headway into what a disagreement is, our next step is to ask how it is that social animals can actually carry out a negotiation to avoid the fight gorilla. That’s what we’ll do over the next two chapters.
As already hinted in the first chapter, there are two main dimensions for negotiations: one concerning my offer (e.g., “How about $207,000 for your house”) and another concerning my level of seriousness (e.g., “and that’s my final offer”).
But rather than coming at these two dimensions straight on in the upcoming two chapters, we’ll be coming at them from a different “angle.” Before we enter our two-chapter romp toward making sense of the signals needed for negotiation (the “steering wheel”), notice that there’s another way to negotiate besides conveying one’s offer and level of seriousness.
Imagine I’m the buyer again. I last offered $200,000 for the house. Now you come back with $220,000. Suppose I were to ask my realtor to say, “The buyer is himself a professional estimator, and knows his real estate valuations very well.” That’s just a polite way of me saying to you, “Do you know who I am?!” As in, do you know how important I am? By telling you this, I’ve signaled that I should get a lower price than $220,000. But I’ve also signaled that I’m serious. This one sentence somehow managed to signal something about both the offer and the level of seriousness. But the one thing I really signaled about was my own confidence level. I’m signaling that I’m super confident.
The upcoming chapter is, in a sense, all about understanding what it means to signal something about one’s own confidence, but it’s also about how our wills can exert force. By the end of chapter three, we’ll have our first two emotional expressions, opposites of one another. We’ll have pride, meaning “I’m confident,” and humility, meaning “I’m not very confident.” And, as we’ll see in chapter five, these are deeply related to two of our least favorite emotional expressions: anger and sadness.
Suppose that I were to ask my realtor to instead say, “The seller has insufficient training on the real estate comps in this neighborhood.” Well, that’s just a polite way of saying, “You have no idea what you’re talking about!”
By telling you this, I’ve signaled—as before—that I should get a lower price than $220,000. Unlike before, though, I’ve made things less serious (for reasons we’ll more fully discuss later, but, intuitively, I’ve lowered the conversation by lowering you). Whereas in the earlier example I made a statement about my own confidence, in this case I’ve made a statement about your confidence. I criticized you rather than flattering myself. I said that your confidence is low.
By the end of chapter four, we’ll have uncovered a second dimension of emotional expressions, and two new opposite emotional expressions straddling it. We’ll have respect, meaning “you’re confident,” and disdain, meaning “you’re not very confident.” And, as we’ll see in chapter five, these two emotional expressions are very closely tied to two basic emotional expressions we all know very well: fear and disgust.
You’ll discover that we can view a negotiation as an offer and a level of seriousness, but we can also view it equivalently as a statement about my level of confidence and your level of confidence. They’re the same thing, but each way of thinking about it allows us to see it from a different angle or direction. Together, we’ll see that they’re all the compass directions on the “steering wheel of negotiation.”